| In recent years,intercultural communicative competence has increasingly become one of the most important goals of talent training along with the development of economic globalization and “The Belt and Road” initiative.Intercultural sensitivity,the emotional level of intercultural communicative competence,refers to the degree of people’s understanding,appreciation and acceptance of cultural differences in intercultural communication.Studies have shown that ICS can largely affects people’s intercultural communicative competence.Meanwhile,traditional English language learning tends to focus more on vocabulary and grammar learning,overlooking the acquisition of pragmatic competence,which leads to the separation of learning and application.According to previous literature,comparatively very few researches were conducted to combine intercultural sensitivity with pragmatic competence though domestic scholars have done some research on them respectively.Besides,the studies on oversea students are mostly limited to Chinese students and international students studying in China.In recent year,the number of Chinese students studying abroad is rising year by year,and their intercultural communicative competence has a direct impact on their academic performance.In order to learn about the current situation and the relationship between ICS and pragmatic competence of Chinese students studying abroad,the author studied this group of students during the time of one-year study in US as exchange student.This study aims to investigate the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation about ICS of Chinese students studying in the USA? Is there any difference among the five dimensions? If so,what type of difference exists?(2)What is the current situation about pragmatic competence of Chinese students studying in the USA? Is there any difference between the two dimensions? If so,what type of difference exists?(3)Is there a correlation between ICS and pragmatic competence of Chinese students studying in the USA? If so,how is ICS related to pragmatic competence?60 Chinese international students from Vermont University and Saint Michael’s College were selected as the research participants.The data of ICS and pragmatic competence of this group were collected by using the methods of questionnaire(the ISS),test(pragmatic competence test)and interview.SPSS 24.0 was employed to analyze the data collected and qualitative analysis was conducted on the interview.The findings of this study are summarized as follows:(1)On the whole,the participants’ current ICS is at a high level.Among the five dimensions of ICS,the mean score of “respect for cultural differences” ranks the highest,followed by “interaction enjoyment”,“interaction attentiveness”,“interaction engagement”,and the mean score of “interaction confidence” is the lowest;besides,the participants’ school types and frequency of their communication with native speakers have different effects on the five dimensions.(2)The current pragmatic competence score perceived by Chinese international students is above the average.As for the two dimensions,the total score of “sociopragmatic competence” is higher than that of “pragmalinguistic competence”;besides,the participants’ grades,school types,and frequency of their communication with native speakers have different effects on the two dimensions.(3)ICS is obviously correlated with pragmatic competence;all five dimensions of ICS exist a significant relationship with pragmatic competence.Among them,“interaction confidence” and “interaction enjoyment” have a positive influence on “pragmalinguistic competence”;“respect for cultural differences” has a positive influence on “sociopragmatic competence”.Based on the above findings,a series of pedagogical implications were put forward to improve second language learners’ ICS and pragmatic competence.Moreover,limitations of the study were pointed out and suggestions for future research were also proposed. |
PDF Full Text Request